PTNSYSTEMS NEWSLETTER SEPTEMBER 2007

Part 1 – Adopting a policy and avoiding trouble

Part 2 - When to rebuild

Part 3 - Spampal

PART 1

As we travel around, installing, configuring and fixing problems we see lots of computers and get to meet the people who own them, most of the time it's a pleasant job. We have to know about a very broad range of topics relating to the industry and often come across new problems which need to be researched, tried and tested before the solution is found, it's a challenge sometimes to say the least.

In previous newsletters we've covered adware, spyware, viruses and other reasons why our machines may slow down and appear unresponsive. One aspect which has a great influence, is the owner's policy towards their PC; and I firmly believe that if you approach the ownership and running of a computer in a certain way you will have far less trouble than some. For example, many companies have strict directives for their employees as to what they can do on their computers at work, they also employ server policies which prevent users from accessing certain parts of the system on their workstation, it's one of the things we do for our business customers, and it's all restricted for a very good reason. If you employ a similar approach, you may avoid some of the problems without a trip to the repair shop.

Let's face it, a personal computer is probably the most complex piece of equipment you own, even the processors which run the management systems in modern cars and mobile phones are childlike in complexity by comparison. If you think of all the electrical devices around the home, it's a struggle to think of any which allow you to make changes to the way they operate. The Sky box or DVD player may give us options to change some of the settings but it's controlled by the manufacturer, there's a limit as to the damage we can do. All our other electrical or electronic household devices are mostly passive and, as far as I know, there are no microwave viruses out there or washing machine hackers. If a friend advised me to put banana skins in my car's fuel tank (as he read it on the Internet and thinks it will go faster in the wet) I would treat his words with suspicion, and most of the flyers I get in the post each day, go straight in the bin. Yet the number of people who have installed something on their PC, based purely on a pub conversation or advice from someone who's a wizard on computers (my personal favourite) is a little worrying. Keeping the car analogy alive for a while, lets imagine I get my nice new car (computer) home, and park it on the drive, instantly another member of the family asks me if they can have a set of keys to go rallying at the weekend, another would like to change the upholstery and wheels to suit their own taste, it would be difficult to agree. As we don't like to be restricted in what we can, and can't, do on our computers, the mouse and keyboard now have complete, and sometimes dangerous, levels of access to all parts of the system, and it's because of this, the computer can surprise us with such a frustrating array of behavioural patterns.

Here are some of the scenarios which are commonly encountered and best avoided.

Multiple user accounts (when you start the computer and a list of family members/other users are listed before you log in)

If you believe that by giving someone their own user account, it doesn't effect the running of the computer when its your turn, I'm afraid it isn't the case. The multiple user account scenario creates multiple instances of files and folders which allow each user the feeling that the PC is now somehow theirs. Keep your part of the system as clean and tidy as you like, it will make no difference if the other users are installing peer to peer file sharing software and generally being reckless. A better scenario is to have one login, for example family-PC and to create individual folders for each user, email can be treated the same way, with each user having their own folder and the email being redirected with a simple rule. All of this makes backing up far simpler and the owner/repair bill payer more aware of what is going on. If little ones really must have their own user accounts, create limited accounts for them as opposed to administrative accounts as this will prevent them from making many harmful changes to the system without having to ask permission. It may sound at this point like a crusade against the young persons computer club, but it is a fact that younger people are more trusting and responsive to advertising, so many of the websites and programs which contain the nasties, target them.

Multiple antivirus/firewall/computer tune-up software/games installations

If your computer is running very slowly and acting strangely, quite simply, the horse has bolted. The addition of more security software will nearly always make matters worse, and many of the programs which supposedly remove infections/adware/malware etc are, in fact, the cause of many of the problems. If you are paying for any annual software subscriptions or asked to pay a one off fee from a piece of software to rid you of a troublesome problem, you are probably wasting your money. At the time of writing this article we have yet to see an occasion where AVG free antivirus has not discovered a virus present on a system and, despite looking at dozens of programs which purport to rid you of other nasties, there is little that free software, such as Adaware or Windows Defender, doesn't catch. I have never seen a case where the installation of two antivirus packages has done anything but cancel each other out and cause problems. We also spend a fair amount of time uninstalling third party firewall software and/or excessively intrusive security software (nagware), real hardware firewalls can cost thousands of pounds, so ask yourself how much protection you're really getting from your £25 per year software subscription. As far as gaming goes, get an Xbox, Playstation, or another computer if you plan to do a lot of this, PC's were never designed for this and the people who write the games don't care if the printer suddenly stops working once their game software is installed (see later).

(I'd rather not if it's ok with you) Install CD first

In the old days of Windows 95/98/98se/ME/2000 we nearly always had to find drivers on CD's to enable us to install every piece of hardware, this is rarely the case nowadays. For example, we often configure most broadband packages without a single software installation. Why? Because those CD's often contain more unwanted software which burdens your system and is completely unnecessary, ever noticed all those extra icons on the desktop after you've installed something? Thanks but no thanks. Sometimes manufacturers make it impossible to install something without doing it their way but, if at all possible, try plugging the hardware into the computer and seeing if Windows is able to install it, you may need to put the CD in the drive for the operating system to find the drivers, but run setup.exe as a last resort. If you feel happier running the CD when installing new hardware, look for the custom option which should allow you to uncheck, and not install, any unwanted software.

PART 2 - When to rebuild

Very often we bring a problematic PC back to the workshop, connect it up and are faced with a decision best made sooner rather than later...... Is worth repairing? If the machine displays familiar traits it's often sorted out relatively quickly, we may have seen the symptoms before or it's obvious where the problem lies. If the PC has been used a lot and has a very long list of programs installed, it's not always so clear. The problem we have, is we simply don't know what the user/user's have done prior to the fault, and I mean since it was new, secondly if we spend 2-3 hours trying to fix the problem and it still is behaving randomly, we may still have to rebuild the machine from a software perspective, thus having wasted those initial hours work. It's often a case of needles in haystacks and how big is the haystack.

After a period of use, the act of installing and uninstalling software, good or bad, starts to have a detrimental effect. The reality is, everything you see on your screen is created by highly complex mathematical computations, very long strings of zeros and ones being added, subtracted, anded, and nanded from each other, then sent to the various pieces of hardware around the system, millions of times per second. A newly installed version of Windows, once updated, has everything in it's rightful place, the result of many thousands of man hours, millions of lines of code, and more millions of dollars of Bill's money. If we made no further changes to our system and just used the programs that were built in, our rather mundane computer would probably run quite nicely until some hardware problem reared its head many years down the line. Now here at PTNSYSTEMS we are not sponsored by Microsoft, but like it or not, it's their software holding everything else up. Go to add/remove programs and look at all the other programs installed on your system, all written by another software house, it's probably accurate to say then, that each computer is unique in its software status and getting more unique every day. This, in turn, makes any problem potentially unique as well.

Everyone likes to share stories of how their printer suddenly started playing up after they installed a new piece of software, or the sound stopped working when the scanner was installed, these scenarios are not so strange when you realise that many of the programs share system files and control of system resources. Think of it like a big post office with each part of the computer collecting its mail from a PO Box, if the sound card comes to collect its mail and it has found its way into the printer box, you get the idea.

Before you start uninstalling all your programs in a bid to give your PC a new lease of life, I'm afraid it's not so simple; installing software involves transferring code from the CD, or other media, into the Windows registry and creating files and folders on the system. Uninstalling involves removing some of the code from the registry, deleting the folders and making the desktop icons disappear at best, it depends on the quality of the program and the diligence of the programmer as to how much is removed. In short prevention (not installing) is much better than cure, and your machine may never be the same again once you've installed a piece of software.

If your machine has a chequered history of installations and downloads, if may be time to start over and reinstall the operating system the next time it goes badly wrong. Unless of course you know where the fault lies in the 40+million lines of source code (XP)  :o)    .

PART 3 - SPAMPAL

Some of our customers who are using Spampal (a very good, and free, spam blocker), have asked about the blacklist and whitelist capabilities, specifically how to add addresses which are erroneously tagged as spam, if you require any help with this, please email the office and we will forward a small attachment with pictures, this will,  hopefully, help and explain.